John Updike Quotes
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about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.
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at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward 'What's wrong with his heart, exactly?' Janice asks.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
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'The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are.'
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One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.
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I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.
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Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.
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Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
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'Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died.'
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When Rabbit first began to drive the road was full of old fogeys going too slow and now it seems nothing but kids in a hell of a hurry, pushing. Let 'em by, is his motto. Maybe they'll kill themselves on a telephone pole in the next mile. He hopes so.
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No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.
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His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.
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'...If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.'
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If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
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Thelma '...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it.'
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You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI.
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He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
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'Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?'
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...he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.
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Nelson '...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife.'
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'Things change,' says Mr Shimada. 'Is world's sad secret.'
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There's more to being a human being than having your own way.
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Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
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There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.